


She Burns

by eastaustraliancurrent



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Southern Water Tribe, Storytelling, descriptions of burns, descriptions of frostbite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 04:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30133695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eastaustraliancurrent/pseuds/eastaustraliancurrent
Summary: "There’s a woman whose life is buried in ice and snow."Sokka and Katara would always scoff at the opening line. "She’s not special," they’d say, and Kya would put a gently shushing finger to her lips."There’s a woman whose life is buried in ice and snow," she’d repeat, "and she burns. "
Relationships: Kanna & Katara (Avatar), Katara & Kya (Avatar), Katara & Sokka (Avatar)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10
Collections: MMEU Spring Equinox Exchange 2021





	She Burns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kevintran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kevintran/gifts).



_ There’s a woman whose life is buried in ice and snow. _

Sokka and Katara would always scoff at the opening line. She’s not special, they’d say, and Kya would put a gently shushing finger to her lips.

_ There’s a woman whose life is buried in ice and snow,  _ she’d repeat,  _ and she burns.  _

_ Most days, it’s all she knows. The endless flame that covers her skin and blazes deep, deep within her. She feels nothing but that fire, yet she is colder than anything you have ever known. So cold, that her skin is as blue and as dark as the shadows in a cave. So cold, that what little hair she has left is just wisps, whipping and snapping in the wind, for she has no hood to keep her head warm. And her fingers… her fingers are a deadened black, so filled with cold they are. _

_ The woman is alone. She lives in the middle of the ice, nothing but white snow and white sky surrounding her. She’s so alone that sometimes she wonders if she, too, is ice. She sees no villages, no coasts, no animals; all she sees is white. _

The story would begin seeping into the children now and Sokka and Katara would settle, their eyes wide, curled into the protective warmth of their own furs as they listened. “Where is everyone?” 

Kya would take her time answering the question, maybe adding a few more stitches to the pualuuk in her lap, maybe glancing around the room as if to ensure that there were no eavesdroppers. As if to make sure that they, too, were alone. As the story grew more familiar, Sokka and Katara would do the same, building the suspense themselves. Once, Sokka even got up to poke his head out the door, so ensnared he was by the story.

_ If there were more to see, the woman would not know it anyways, for her senses were taken from her so long ago that she can hardly remember them. Her eyes are frozen in their sockets, her ears packed with snow. Her jaw hangs loose on its hinges and, though she does not know it, a small bird has made its home there. Her nose is as black as her fingers, but the worst is none of these. These losses are all merices, benumbed and frozen so she feels none of their pain and all of their absence. The worst is her flesh. _

_ The mercy of the numb is not found here, and if the woman had the strength for it, you’d hear the cries of her agony throughout the land. Her skin is more alive than she can bear, crackling with the fire of ice, strangling her movements, fracturing as it strains around her joints. It feels like how she would imagine lightning to feel, constant and bright, licking fire up her legs and her arms and her chest and her neck and her cheeks and and and. It’s everywhere, it’s always, and it’s the only thing reminding her that she still lives, that she still burns. _

“Why can’t she die?” Sokka once whispered. Hakoda had happened into the igloo when he asked that, and Kya didn’t finish the story that night. Katara and Sokka hadn’t quite been able to understand the argument they heard that night, heavy murmurs after they had been tucked into bed, but it was clear that it was a debate familiar to their parents.

“You’ll scare them,” Hakoda would say.

“Children can stand to be scared every once in a while.”

“Not like this, Kya.” And then their father would sigh, deep and full of the burdensome emotion that seemed to permeate all the adults in the tribe, and the rest of their conversation would fade from their young memories.

On nights when they weren’t found out, Kya would continue:  _ Most days, the woman can hardly remember anything but the ice she is now. That’s why she has no name; she can’t remember it. Sometimes, when she tries hard enough, she manages to squeeze liquid tears of memory from her lifeless eyes, and in the small moments before the tears freeze to her eyelids, she remembers her life before. _

_ It’s just shards, slicing her frozen skin as she grasps for them. She lived once— she refuses to believe otherwise, but her memories are blue and chatter in the wind. She tries to push warmth into them, she treis, but she has no warmth to give and the weight of the white sky is heavy on her shoulders, heavy enough to shatter her into fragments. The doubt is colder than the simple knowledge of the truth would be, so she spends her days convincing herself that there is a truth.  _

_ In the long, endless cold, she goes through the motions as though they alone are enough. She pulls an invisible hood over her naked head. She threads a nonexistent needle with nonexistent thread, even though her fingers are so cold that they make clicking noises when she accidentally knocks them into each other. She shapes those numb hands into her best approximation of a cup, full of no broth, and brings it shaking to her lips. She holds her arms wide, encircles empty air, and pretends there is a body for her to hold close. It never works. _

Sometimes, when Katara was alone (never  _ alone,  _ not like the woman is), she’d put her empty hands through the motions of fulfilment, to see if it worked for her, that, if need be, she could sustain herself on nothing. But it felt silly, holding her arms up in an empty circle, all by herself, and she’d laugh nervously and glance over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching. 

(Who would watch? She was out of sight, hidden from everyone, yet she still felt eyes on her.)

_ The woman lives her life exactly as she had before. She walks in the same circles every day, living in the memory of a village long gone, so wrecked by its absence that she never once thought to leave its grave. Besides, where else can she go? She carves the land with her repetitive stride, cutting the pattern of her village into the ground. She cannot stop for fear that all that’s left are the paths she’s traced with blackened, burning feet. She cannot stop for fear that if she does, so will she. She cannot stop for fear that without her, it would be gone forever. So she scars the land as she was once scarred herself, burning quiet, dark, and eternal. _

::

The story was nothing like the others the adults would tell, and it was for this reason that Sokka and Katara could never seem to forget it. As they grew, they saw the pattern in the stories, how in each one there was a lesson meant to be learned, a warning or a moral. But the story of the woman was different, something about it that they just couldn’t quite grasp, and they puzzled over it often. There wasn’t much sense to their theories when they were little, and the story was for a while a monster story.

“If you ruin my snowman, that woman is gonna get you!” Sokka had cried once.

Katara hadn’t needed to ask what woman he was talking about and ran, tears streaming, to her mother for reassurance.

“Why would she want to hurt you?” Kya had asked.

“She’s a monster,” Sokka said decisively. Katara snuffled into their mother’s furs.

Kya’s face hardened, the only time Katara had seen her expression like that besides the day when she bartered her own life for her daughter’s. “She is not.”

Kya’s death was the first time Katara began to understand the woman. There was a grief too hot to touch in the pit of her stomach and her skin itched with the cold of the world around her, but her tears still flowed warm into her hands. When she grew up, she realized that she wasn’t the only one who burned after that day. At the time she was too distraught to notice, but she remembered. She remembered her brother, sitting quiet and cold in the snow for hours, staring into the uniform white surrounding the village. Or her grandmother, who looked to the sea with a fire in her eyes hotter than the flames that had been turned against their own village. Even her father, sitting a silent and aching numb in those first few months, would press his lips together as though he feared opening them would release a howling swarm of birds.

That year after the raid, Katara saw the woman in her own village, tracing paths still darkened with ash between the igloos, the wind tangling her hair. This woman, however, Katara could offer a bowl of suaasat. She could pull her hair away from her face, tie it back, then gently tug her hood back over her head and lead her home. But there was always another. They lived in near half the igloos, rearing their dark heads and making Katara’s heart race because each time she sat them down, she never knew what she would see beneath the curtain of tangled hair. Would it be her mother, face melted and blackened by the fire and cold? Would she comb back the dark locks only for a bird to fly out of a broken jaw? Katara knew what she feared, knew what she hoped for, but every time all she found was the face of a neighbor, numb with loss. The raid wasn’t an isolated tragedy, and its effects filled their graves long after it ended.

::

When Katara and Sokka left on the back of the Avatar’s bison, they watched their village shrink behind them, their grandmother standing still and small in their wake, her hood down and hair whipping loose in the wind. Katara glanced at Sokka, but he didn’t return her gaze, watching their village disappear into the clouds with a fear in his face that he hid the moment he turned away.

She asked him about an hour into the journey, her words hidden from Aang beneath the rushing air, if he could remember their parents’ arguments about the story, what their dad had said about the woman. Sokka had always been the best at remembering their mother’s stories.

“I dunno,” he said, critically inspecting the craft of the saddle.

“I don’t believe you,” Katara said.

Sokka glared at her.

He didn’t tell her until late the next night, after they left the Southern Air Temple, after they had seen the corpses, after Katara had stepped too close to one of them and a bird flew from the nest it had made in the hollow of a jawbone, sending thrills of icy fear down her spine and a shriek from her lips, her hands jumping to grasp at her brother’s arm as he stared wide-eyed at the nest.

Swaddled in darkness, Sokka watched Aang’s hunched form at the head of the bison. “All I remember,” he said slowly, “is why Dad didn’t want her to tell us the story.”

Katara shuffled closer to him and he automatically lifted an arm for her to huddle under, together against the numbing chill of the altitude and wind. She wrapped a reciprocal arm around his waist. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Not yet.’”

Katara laughed, no humor in it, just a surprised exhalation of air. “Too late.”

::

For a long time they didn’t see the woman, though it wasn’t easy to forget her. They’d see a little girl with scorch marks arcing across her shoulder, and her mother’s eyes would be bright with a burning fire. Or they’d be walking through the streets when an icy hand would brush along Sokka’s ankle, and they’d stop to give the old woman with the shivering, warped hands whatever food they had on them. And sometimes, after dinner, Katara would go to rinse the pot in the river and stare transfixed at the way her own feature would distort, melt, in the reflection of the cool water.

But the woman was there in the woods that night, the night when Sokka and Katara told every scary story they knew except hers, and she stepped from the trees like a ghost, her pale hair fluttering in the cold air, her fingers chill in the brief moment they rested on Katara’s shoulder as she guided the children to her inn. Hama was kind, Hama was cold, Hama was the home they had been missing for months, so Katara ignored the way her gaze sent shivers down her spine, like it was the gaze of someone she should know.

Or, she tried to ignore it until Sokka grabbed her by the wrist the next day and tugged her into an empty room.

“I don’t trust her,” he said urgently.

Katara glared at him. “She reminds me of Gran Gran.” 

Sokka blinked at her, then glanced around, as if to ensure there were no eavesdroppers. He even poked his head out the door for a moment. “I dunno, Katara. Doesn’t she kinda remind you of… you know?” He mimed taking a hood off his head, dangled his jaw grotesquely.

“What?  _ No! _ ” Katara snapped, taken aback, arguing instinctively with her brother. “Don’t be mean.”

But that night, alone in the woods, Hama beckoned Katara towards the shadows, a fiery glint in her eyes and ice on her fingers, and offered another taste of home. It wasn’t the warm nourishment that Hama’s meal that night had provided, but a bitterness that lingered on her tongue when she saw moonlight wash Hama a glistening white, the silhouette of someone she saw in the snow, at the edges of her periphery.

Katara compensated for her fear with loathing, harboring a hatred for Hama, almost strong enough to mask her familiarity. Almost.

“She was family,” Sokka said one night, low, just for Katara to hear.

Katara flinched. “She kidnapped people.”

Sokka just shrugged. “I know. Still family, though.”

::

The end of a war doesn’t bring the dead back to life; it just leaves the survivors to haunt the rubble of the world, looking for a life that was splintered to pieces long ago. There were plenty of shadows shifting through the wreckage when Sokka and Katara returned home, dull faces that plastered on hope when they arrived on the back of the Avatar’s bison. There wasn’t much they could do, however. A year had passed, people had moved inland and back out again. Katara and Aang could easily reinforce all the igloos within a day. What really needed to be rebuilt was the population, and only time could fix that.

Aang left after about a week, beckoned by the rest of the world, and Katara and Sokka were left on the ice shelf just in time for winter.

Winter was a stationary time, a time to tell stories and play games. This winter was full of the hope as well as the sorrow the end of a war brings. The tribe told stories of bravery, of humor, they caught each other up on everything that had been missed when they had been so fractured. They told stories of loss, memories of those who wouldn’t return. It was beautiful, it was cathartic, it was almost too painful to bear, but all the dead have left is memory, and Katara did her best to respect that with a listening ear.

The nights, however, were quiet, and when Katara couldn’t sleep, she would leave her family’s igloo, opening the hole and letting the shadows of the interior dissolve into the shadows of the sky until she was swallowed by the night.

Katara walked alongside the woman, their footsteps falling together, her presence made clear in the dark at her side. Her hair tangled in the cold and the tip of her nose went nearly numb and her teeth clattered together, but she walked and walked. Katara never looked at the woman. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see her, but she didn’t think she could bear it if she left. She walked circles through the village, carving the familiar path, and wondered whose face she would see if she would just turn her head, peer into the shadows. Would she find eyes, frozen wide, frozen blind, perched above a dangling jaw? Would her mother return her gaze, flesh warped and smoking? Or maybe she’d see the gleam of moonlit white hair, a wizened face twisted with blame. No, Katara did not want to look at the woman.

The first time Katara heard the footsteps, she accepted it; it was the woman at her side. But the uneven tilt of the sound had her turning around to see her brother following her out of the igloo. He was still limping, and Katara had yet to find the courage to tell him she feared he may never stop, carrying the war in his gait for the rest of his life. Which, Katara was beginning to realize, they all would do, though perhaps not as physically as Sokka would.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Where’s your crutch?”

Sokka rolled his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said. He frowned then, and reached over Katara’s shoulder to tug her hood onto her head.

Katara scowled at him, knocking his hand away as he smoothed the lining down. “You want to be even more fine? Use the crutch.”

They stared at each other for a moment in the brutal cold of the dark, Sokka’s brow furrowed in concern.

“What?” Katara snapped.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I could ask you the same,” she shot back. Katara wasn’t the only one who could get restless at night.

Sokka crossed his arms. “Yeah, well I don’t walk in circles around the whole village like a ghost.”

Katara huffed. “I don’t have time for this.” She turned back to the village path, the shadows of the woman clinging to her side.

Sokka let her go.

But the next time Katara slipped out into the dark, Sokka found her again, scattering the shadows with his uneven footsteps, pulling her hood roughly over her head once more. They walked the paths together, silent.

It didn’t become a routine. Though he was loath to admit it, Katara could tell that walking for too long in the cold was painful for her brother. But that wasn’t to say she didn’t miss the company; Sokka was much warmer companionship than the woman was. Instead, he would wait up, staying awake until Katara found her way back inside.

There was a day when all the tribe did was dance, sing, play music. The elders tried to teach Katara from memory the dances the waterbenders would perform, excited arguments and frustrated nostalgia as they struggled to remember the forms they never themselves were taught. Sokka played the drum with one of the younger men, laughing and teasing Katara as the elders directed her, and the day felt warmer for the music.

In a quiet moment Katara sat alone with her grandmother, mending clothes and listening to her speak. Gran Gran was reminiscing, inspired by the day’s dance lesson, about someone she had once known, a woman who knew bending better than anyone else. She had liked to come up with new moves and tricks, and was just the best teacher anyone could ask for. Well on her way to becoming a master, Gran Gran reckoned, before she was taken.

Katara had set her needle down about halfway into the story. “I met someone like that,” she murmured. 

“I’m sure you did,” Gran Gran replied. “The Northern Water Tribe has many talented benders.”

“No, she was Southern,” Katara said before she could think about it.

Gran Gran stopped sewing then and looked at her granddaughter. 

Katara swallowed, nervous suddenly. She hadn’t told anyone about Hama and, as far as she knew, neither had Sokka. “I… we met her in the Fire Nation.”

“Katara,” Gran Gran said slowly. “You met a Southerner— a Southern waterbender— and you didn’t mention it until now? Where is she? We need to bring her home.”

Katara felt her throat tighten and she dug her fingers into the furs she was mending. “Gran Gran…”

Sorrowful understanding washed over Gran Gran’s face. “Oh.” She shifted closer, reaching out to embrace Katara. “Did she…?”

Katara carefully pushed away her grandmother’s arms. She pressed her lips together, then nodded. 

Gran Gran’s hands fell back to her lap as she stared confusedly at Katara. She didn’t prod, and Katara wished she would, just so she could unstick the words that were lodging themselves in her throat. She found her strength in looking away, staring at the furs in her lap.

“She changed, Gran Gran. She wasn’t the woman you knew.”

Gran Gran frowned. “Of course she did,” she murmured. “We’ve all changed.”

“No, she… Gran Gran she would— she was kidnapping innocent people. She found a way to bend their b-blood, and, and…” Katara reached up to wipe away a tear with a trembling hand. “And she made me do the same. I— we had to turn her over to the Fire Nation again.”

Katara could hardly bring herself to look at her grandmother, but when the silence stretched ever-onwards, she forced herself to. Gran Gran was silent, her face blank as she looked at her granddaughter, her hands as still as stone atop the anorak she was mending.

“Gran Gran?”

Gran Gran shut her eyes and shook her head. She inhaled, long and low, then exhaled heavily. “Please leave me, Katara,” she said quietly.

“What? Gran Gran—”

She held up a hand. “Katara. Please.”

Katara bit her lip and nodded tightly, then set her things aside and left the igloo, her hands shaking at her sides.

There wasn’t really any place to hide in the Southern Water Tribe. Unless, of course, you wanted to die alone in the snow. The least Katara could do for the rest of the day was to never find herself alone with her grandmother, half out of respect for her wishes, and half for the sake of Katara’s own, endless guilt. It burned beneath her skin, a raging fear that she had done something unforgivable, worsened by the fact that she still couldn’t fully understand it. What more could she have done for Hama? And why would she do more for Hama, when Hama had hurt her so? These questions had blazed in Katara’s mind ever since that night under the moon, a shield to hide behind at times when the guilt was consuming. She couldn’t have let Hama go. And she didn’t think she could have stopped the Fire Nation from taking her anyways. In their igloo, Gran Gran sat quietly, tucked into the shadows, deep in thought, and Katara both hoped and feared that maybe her grandmother knew what she should have done differently.

That night, the shadows were as dark as ever, leaping to her side as she stepped out, and Katara started on her usual path around the village, the woman clinging to her side like a limpet. Her presence was ice in her veins, ice that sharpened and stabbed when Katara looked up to see the moon hanging full above her. She forced herself to stare at it, a punishing reminder of what she had done. The stream of her breath was thick in the air as her lungs tightened, almost to the point where she was gasping into the night air, choking on her tears. It was cold, colder than anything, and yet Katara felt as though any second the ice might start melting around her for the sheer heat of emotion she radiated. A shadow flicked in her periphery and Katara averted her eyes out of habit but… tonight, she wanted to look.

Would looking be just another self-inflicted punishment? Or was it a selfish desire for something to direct her pain towards? Or was it a moment of hope, of weakness, seeking some sort of comfort from the spectre who refused to stop haunting her?

Katara whipped her head around, as if to deprive the woman of the chance to disappear. There was no need to worry, though, for the shadow was constant. It stared back at her, a pool so dark it was near purple, its shape the same as Katara’s own. She was no longer panting, her gasps frozen in her lungs as she stared at the figure outlined on the wall. Katara turned slowly, so she faced it directly, the moonlight sharp on her back. She shifted right, and the shadow followed. Left, the same. It was her own silhouette, and Katara remarked in a small, surreal moment, that she must have grown some since she last took notice. This, she thought, could be the silhouette of her mother. Or her grandmother.

“I know you,” Katara whispered, the words leaving her lips in a soft cloud, proof that they were real. The shadow shivered.

Katara raised her arm, let it fall. Watched as the shadow mimicked her. She bent an orb of water, then, after a moment, twirled it around in the move the elders had shown her earlier. The shadow did the same.

“Do you remember the dances?” Katara asked. She shook her head. “Neither do I.” She dropped the water at her side, let it freeze over the snow. When she reached up to pull her hood over her head, her shadow did the same, and Katara could swear it looked almost grateful.

Sokka was sitting outside tonight, back against the igloo and staring up at the moon, and he jumped when Katara touched his shoulder.

“La, Katara, I thought you were someone else.”

Katara sat down carefully beside him. “Who, Yue?”

Sokka flinched in surprise. “What? No.”

“Oh,” Katara winced. “Sorry, I just thought…”

“You wished you sounded like Yue,” Sokka said with a forced laugh. “You’re more like a herd of camelephants.”

“Hey!” Katara shoved him and he toppled into the snow with a smile that looked real this time.

“Who were you talking to over there?” he asked casually as he brushed the snow off his side.

Katara’s turn to flinch. “You heard that?”

Sokka nodded.

The quiet was crystalline, heavy and sharp, the only disturbance being the sound of their own breaths, hangin perilously in the air. Katara let it rest for a moment, let its edges sink into her until they broke the skin.

“Don’t laugh,” she warned feebly. More like “don’t scream,” but she didn’t say that to him.

Sokka hummed thoughtfully. “Don’t say anything funny then.”

“I’m serious, Sokka.”

“So am I!”

Katara glared at him, but he wasn’t doing that stupid smirk he always did when he teased her. He was just watching her, his face open in the moonlight. Waiting. Katara looked back up at the moon. It was right in front of them, so the shadows were sparse, though she knew how dark they would be on the other side of the igloo. “I was talking to… to her.”

She could tell she didn’t need to elaborate any further when Sokka started picking at the hem of his anorak. He wasn’t surprised, though. He didn’t freak out in the way Katara was sure he would have. He just nodded, looking down at his hands as they wrung the edge of his coat.

“Well?” Katara prompted.

“Well,” Sokka said slowly. “That definitely wasn’t funny.”

“You’re an asshole,” Katara huffed, and she got to her feet. 

“Wait, Katara!” Sokka grabbed her wrist. “I’m sorry. Don’t go.”

Katara reluctantly sat back down, half because of how insistently Sokka tugged on her wrist, half because of the way her shadow grew and stretched when she stood up.

“I get it,” Sokka said after a moment of staring into the icy landscape. “I mean, not really, but… I hear her, too. Sometimes.”

Katara blinked. She had never  _ heard _ the woman. She didn’t think the woman could make a sound. “What does she say?”

Sokka lifted a shoulder, shook his head. “I dunno. Not a lot of words in it. Sometimes she sounds kinda like Mom, though.”

Katara dragged her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“Usually she just makes noises, though,” Sokka continued. “Shuffling around the village at night. Half the time, it’s just you. That’s why I get up, y’know. To check if it’s you or her.”

Katara closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the igloo. “And?” she asked.

“And… what?”

“Which is it?”

Sokka breathed in, slowly though his nose, then exhaled it in a long stream. “I dunno, Katara. You tell me.”

Katara didn’t say anything. In the silence, they could hear the gentle movement of the ocean in the near distance, never resting, never at peace.

Sokka huffed out a small laugh.

“What?”

He shook his head. “It’s… it’s stupid, it’s not even funny.”

“What, Sokka?” Katara demanded.

“I just was thinking… You know, I thought Hama was the woman.”

Katara remembered her conversation with Gran Gran and felt a hollow pain thud in her chest.

“Not just  _ like _ the woman,” Sokka continued. “I thought she was  _ the  _ woman. And I thought that when they took her, she’d be gone forever.”

“She is, Sokka,” Katara said lowly.

Sokka rubbed uncomfortably at his knee. “I… I know Hama is. I just thought that, y’know, the woman would maybe leave us alone. I dunno. I told you it was stupid. Obviously it’s stupid, because we’re still out here talking about her.”

“You’re right,” Katara said, and Sokka looked around at her surprised. “It is stupid.”

“Hey,” he said softly.

“She’s never gonna go away, Sokka.”

“Well… yeah,” Sokka murmured. “I know that now.”

Nobody breached the quiet this time, and they sat out in the night beneath the full moon until the cold was unbearable.

::

“Come help me with this, Katara,” Gran Gran had asked. They were making new coats together, just the two of them, and every time Katara pulled the sinew through the skins she feared it would snap. Ignoring Katara’s nerves, Gran Gran took her time, gaze focused on her own quiet, methodical work.

Finally, without looking up or pausing, she said:

_ There’s a woman whose life is buried in ice and snow. _

Katara set her needle down, her fingers already shaking as she listened to the story she hadn’t heard since before her mother died. It was the same, exactly the same, but it was shocking the difference that a new voice could make. It seemed almost silly, that it was only in that moment that Katara realized her mother hadn’t made the story special just for her children. The words from her grandmother’s tongue, when compared to how she remembered them from her mother’s made Katara wonder how they would sound in her own mouth. How they would taste.

Her grandmother didn’t pause once in her work until she finished the story, her gaze burning when it landed on Katara.

“That’s Mom’s story,” Katara said blankly.

Gran Gran shook her head. “It’s our story.” Then her fingers resumed their work, drawing her gaze safely back down.

“I really am sorry, Gran Gran,” Katara whispered. “About Hama. I didn’t—”

“Thank you, Katara,” Gran Gran said, “but I don’t blame you.” She sighed. “I can’t say that I’m not… disappointed. But, I don’t blame you. I’m sorry you had to face that.”

Katara nodded tightly and turned back to her work, smoothing it over and over in her lap. Her hands were still shaking and she repeated the motion, hoping it would still them.

“And,” Gran Gran said. Katara looked back up at her and met her gaze for the first time since the day before. “I don’t blame Hama either. Do you understand, Katara?”

“I… I think I do.”

Gran Gran finally smiled, small and sad, and she set her sewing aside. Katara fell into her open arms gratefully.

::

There’s a woman whose life is filled with ice and snow, and she burns.

Some days, it’s all she knows. The endless pain that goes so deep it feels like a part of her soul. But only some days.

Most days, she feels anything but the burn. She feels the gentle wind on her cheeks, the ground solid beneath her feet, the sun’s rays soft on her skin. The ice and snow will always be her home, but it will never be her prison. She can leave if she chooses, go find the green grass or hot sand, go anywhere she wishes. But she will always choose to return to the ice and snow.

The woman is never alone. She doesn’t think she could be if she tried, carrying the love of her people with her no matter how far she strays. There’s a family in the ice that is hers, and someday she will add to it. Her children will know a world where war is a memory, but she will make sure they remember. Someday she will tell them about the woman who sacrificed herself. The woman who escaped, if only for a while. The woman who stayed behind. She will tell them about the shadow that follows their own mother, but she won’t tell them so young, to give them the freedom of youth she never had.

The woman will never go away. Katara knows that. But she will create a world where the woman will be only a memory, a story to learn from.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy spring equinox! I hope you enjoy, and have a wonderful spring.


End file.
